TeenRead Books

06/15/2011

Ship Breaker's distopia

Here's a cool video with an interview with Paolo Bacigalupi and some astonishing pictures of ship breaking operations in modern Bangladesh: Check it out!

In the interview, Bacigalupi talks about how he created the distopian future the novel is set in by asking,

"What will our world look like when we run out of cheap energy?"

He says that "Nailer is living inside the consequences of our present" in Ship Breaker. His world is a post-oil, global-warming world, in which "the adults made all the bad decisions all along the way."

Throughout the novel, Nailer struggles to figure out what is right and what decisions he should make for himself, since he can't look up to most of the adults he knows. Were there places in the book where you weren't sure whether Nailer was making the right decision? What did you think he should do instead?